Florida Film Festival: Field of dreams for filmmakers

Jennifer Brea grew up in Winter Park, attended Trinity Preparatory School and saw movies at the Enzian theater in Maitland frequently, but she never attended the Florida Film Festival.

“I thought it was for celebrities.” she said. “I didn’t know you could go to it.”

At 34, Brea will attend her first Florida Film Festival as a filmmaker. Her first work, the documentary “Unrest,” will screen at the 26th annual festival, which starts Friday, April 21, and runs 10 days.

“I didn’t set out to become a filmmaker,” said Brea, now of Los Angeles. “Enzian is where I fell in love with cinema. To screen my first film there is just so incredible.”

The festival, playing at Enzian and Regal Winter Park Village Stadium 20, has entertained thousands through the years, but it also has demonstrated the power of the arts by inspiring and challenging filmmakers.

Aaron Koontz, an alum of Full Sail University, volunteered at the festival and attended for years. His psychological thriller “Camera Obscura” will screen at the festival.

“It’s such a surreal situation,” said Koontz, 37, of Austin, Texas. “I remember very distinctly watching a Full Sail short film that I wrote playing at the Enzian, and it was awful. Truly embarrassing. It was such a great venue to debut such a bad film, and that day I swore, nearly 15 years ago, that one day I would come back with a real movie and do this right.”

The Florida Film Festival will present 182 films this year, and 35 have Florida connections.

“We always want to make sure that our home state is well-represented, and that’s one of the reasons we include a Florida Sidebar every year and the Best of Brouhaha program,” said Matthew Curtis, the festival’s programming director.

The Florida Sidebar is made up of Florida films that are shorts, documentaries or narrative features. The 35 Florida-related films this year are eight features and 27 shorts. Thirteen of those shorts are gathered in the Best of Brouhaha, which celebrates works by Florida filmmakers. A full schedule is available at floridafilmfestival.com.

Other shorts include “Vinyl Revival,” a 10-minute celebration of vinyl records that visits Park Ave CDs in Orlando, Groovy Records in DeLand and Atlantic Sounds in Daytona Beach. It’s the first time at the festival for director Shasta Ford, 21, a Stetson University grad from Deltona.

“I remember the first time I visited the Enzian and saw the Florida Film Festival posters hanging on the wall,” Ford said. “The idea of having a film in the festival was so exciting and was an opportunity that I dreamed of.”

Lauren DeFilippo, 33, a University of Florida grad who lives in Brooklyn, is also at the festival for the first time. “It’s a well-respected festival in the documentary world,” she said.

“Some find the idea of a drive-in church tender and nostalgic, others absurd, still others think it’s just flat-out funny,” DeFilippo said. “I hope that in seeing the film, people identify with the churchgoers and reflect on how they, too, connect with their own surrounding environment and with each other.”

Jeff Truesdell, 57, a former Orlando Weekly editor, connected with the festival from the start as a volunteer. He continued through the years, wrote presentations and introduced “The Blair Witch Project” from the Enzian stage.

Truesdell, who lives in St. Louis, will be back at the festival as executive producer on the feature documentary “For Ahkeem,” which grew out of a feature he reported for People magazine. The film follows a 17-year-old African-American girl as she makes life-changing decisions, and it’s Truesdell’s first time as a filmmaker.

“It was personally important to me to bring this project back to Orlando and the friends there,” he said. “Orlando, where I spent 17 years embedded with smart and curious arts-and-culture writers, and the intimate Enzian, where I ate a lot of real buttered popcorn watching movies I didn’t find anywhere else in a pre-Netflix era — both just feel like home to me.”

“Unrest” director Brea echoed the idea of home. She spent four years on her film, a frank look at her chronic fatigue syndrome.

Florida Film Festival

(Florida Film Festival)

“This has been a harrowing and hard thing to go through, but if I can be grateful to it for anything, it’s made me a filmmaker,” she said. “That’s something I’ll have for the rest of my life.”

She said she “definitely” plans to make more films and has an idea for a TV series.

“Unrest” played the Sundance Film Festival and has started to screen at festivals around the world, but Brea said she was coming full circle at Enzian.

“To come home with the film is so meaningful to me,” she said. “The whole time I was making the film, I was dreaming about Sundance and the Florida Film Festival.”